What can MATLAB do that R cannot do

Question

I often hear people complain how expensive MATLAB licenses are  Then I wonder why they don t just use Octave or R  But is the latter right  Can you use R to replace MATLAB

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We can t because it s expected required by our customers

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Short answer  no  of course not  While any set of mathematical software packages will have their overlaps  they will always have biases towards certain problem domains  These biases figure strongly in whether or not you want to use one of these packages   An example of what MATLAB can do that R cannot is interface to real-time hardware for signal processing acquisition and control  A Simulink model in MATLAB can be configured both to run in simulation on your machine before compiling the code to execute on a real system taking measured data as input and calculating appropriate outputs  what was before a simulation of a control system is now a fully functioning one   With the appropriate hardware board in your machine  you can run real-time control systems through a PC   R  by contrast  seems firmly set in the role of statistics  where I m sure it out-performs what MATLAB can do  Similarly  Mathematica is better than MATLAB at symbolic maths  Python is better than MATLAB at general programming  gnuplot is better than all of them at actually creating graphs  er  I assume   and so on

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R is an environment for statistical data analysis and graphics  MATLAB s origins are in numerical computation  The basic language implementations have many features in common if you use them for for data manipulation  e g   matrix vector operations    R has statistical functionality hard to find elsewhere   2000 Packages on CRAN   and lots of statisticians use it  On the other hand  MATLAB has lots of  expensive  toolboxes for engineering applications like   image processing image acquisition  filter design  fuzzy logic fuzzy control  partial differential equations  etc

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Support for interactive graphics is much better in matlab than in R   I hate matlab as a language  but I get jealous when I see how its users can explore data with mouse operations  while I m busy repeating commands with new values for xlim etc   Matlab also handles multi-panel plots much better than any of the R methods for the task   Generally  R graphics has a 1960s feel   It s fine for publication  but not the best solution for interactive exploration of data

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One big advantage of MATLAB over R is the quality of MATLAB documentation   R  being open source  suffers in this respect  a feature common to many open source projects   R is  however  a very useful environment and language   It is widely used in the bioinformatics community and has many packages useful in this domain   An alternative to R is Octave  http   www gnu org software octave   which is very similar to MATLAB  it can run MATLAB scripts

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Can you use R to replace MATLAB    Yes   I used MATLAB for years but switched primarily to R in the last 3 years   At this point  they have much more in common than not   It partially depends on your field and use-case   And as Spencer Graves said previously  it also depends on which  church you happen to frequent    It s best if you look at the MATLAB toolkit vs  CRAN for a specific task before you decide     A similar question asked on R-Help a few years ago and again more recently   David Hiebeler  at the University of Maine  maintains an extensive R MATLAB comparison  and is the best reference on the subject   You can also review this comparison of basic functions    Here are some of the things that I ve observed in the past  none of which should be deal-breakers    Generally  MATLAB has a better programming environment  e g  better documentation  better debuggers  better object browser  and is  easier  to use  you can use MATLAB without doing any programming if you want    Simulink allows you to visually program by connecting blocks in graphs   REvolution R is addressing some of these differences by providing a better IDE with improved debugging  but it s still a step behind  MATLAB is a little faster with the normal configuration  see this benchmark for an example   although there are things that can be done to improve R performance if that becomes an issue  Since it s commercial  it also arguably has more  products   in the sense of integrated add-ons  and support  but you pay for it    See the product list   For instance  it has things like the MATLAB compiler which creates executable MATLAB programs that can be deployed  So far as packages toolkits are concerned  MATLAB has much more support for the physical sciences while R is stronger for statistics  which is not to say that the other can t perform these tasks   And they can both be easily extended    So  if ease-of-use isn t a primary concern  and there s no other business reason to avoid using an open-source tool   then I think that there s a real case to be made for using R   It has a very strong community around it  the R mailing lists are amazing   is rapidly developing  see CRAN   and it s free  which isn t a small issue       Edit  I would just add one further point to this  the book  Functional Data Analysis with R and MATLAB  includes a chapter on the  Essential Comparisons of the Matlab and R Languages    This covers some important syntax differences  such as the interpretation of a dot  or the meaning of square brackets       The book itself is well worth reading for anyone interested in functional programming  in either language

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With the sqldf package  R is capable of not only statistics  but serious data mining as well - assuming there is enough RAM on your machine     And with the RServe package R becomes a regular TCP IP server  so you can call R out of java  or any other language if you have the api    There is also a package in R to call java out or R

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I have used both R and MATLAB to solve problems and construct models related to Environmental Engineering and there is a lot of overlap between the two systems   In my opinion  the advantages of MATLAB lie in specialized domain-specific applications   Some examples are      Functions such as streamline that aid in fluid dynamics investigations  Toolboxes such as the image processing toolset   I have not found a R package that provides an equivalent implementation of tools like the watershed algorithm    In my opinion MATLAB provides far better interactive graphics capabilities   However  I think R produces better static print-quality graphics  depending on the application  MATLAB s symbolic math toolbox is also better integrated and more capable than R equivalents such as Ryacas or rSymPy   The existence of the MATLAB compiler also allows systems based on MATLAB code to be deployed independently of the MATLAB environment-- although it s availability will depend on how much money you have to throw around   Another thing I should note is that the MATLAB debugger is one of the best I have worked with   The principle advantage I see with R is the openness of the system and the ease with which it can be extended   This has resulted in an incredible diversity of packages on CRAN   I know Mathworks also maintains a repository of user-contributed toolboxes and I can t make a fair comparison as I have not used it that much   The openness of R also extends to linking in compiled code   A while back I had a model written in Fortran and I was trying to decide between using R or MATLAB as a front-end to help prepare input and process results   I spent an hour reading about the MEX interface to compiled code   When I found that I would have to write and maintain a separate Fortran routine  that did some intricate pointer juggling in order to manage the interface  I shelved MATLAB   The R interface consists of calling  Fortran   subroutine name    argument list   and is simply quicker and cleaner

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I agree with many of the answers given above  Since the answer is specific to the diffset of MATLAB and R capabilities  I will mention a very important one  MATLAB includes a JVM and has flawless and robust interoperability with Java  All of Java s vast universe of libraries is accessible to the MATLAB user  The MATLAB IDE can be almost be used as a poor man s Eclipse  In comparison  rJava is very immature  despite the very valuable effort of its creator  Roman Francois

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As a user of both MATLAB and R  I think they are very different applications  I myself have a background in computer science  etc  and I can t help thinking that R is by statisticians for statisticians whereas MATLAB is by programmers for programmers   R makes it very easy to visualize and compute all sorts of statistical stuff but I wouldn t use it to implement anything signal processing related if it was up to me   To sum up  if you want to do statistics  use R  If you want to program  use MATLAB or some programming language

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In my experience moving from MATLAB to Python is an easier transition - Python with numpy scipy is closer to MATLAB in terms of style and features than R  There are also open source direct MATLAB clones Octave and Scilab   There is certainly much that MATLAB can do that R can t - in my area MATLAB is used a lot for real time data aquisition - most hardware companies include MATLAB interfaces  While this may be possible with R I imagine it would be a lot more involved  Also Simulink provides a whole area of functionality which I think is missing from R  I m sure there is more but I m not so familiar with R

[matlab] What can MATLAB do that R cannot do?

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